© Black Hare Press
I’ve never thought of myself as a Christmassy person, but the festive season of 2025 has allowed me to get a couple of Christmas-set short stories into print. So maybe I’m less of a Scrooge or a Grinch than I’d believed.
A month ago, my story Southbound Traveller appeared in the collection White Witch’s Hat & Other Yuletide Ghost Stories from Belfast’s Heavenly Flower Publishing. The story was set in 1990s Scotland and tried mostly for a realistic tone. Rather than ghosts, it featured an example of what’s best described as a ‘paranormal incident’ near its end. For that reason, Southbound Traveller appeared under the penname Steve Cashel, which I use for my less fantastical Scottish fiction.
Now, my story The Dark Crooked One has just been published in the book Eerie Christmas 4 from Melbourne’s Black Hare Press, which its blurb describes as a “collection of yuletide tales where the holly is sharp, the snow hides secrets, and something ancient stirs beneath the carols.” It contains “haunted traditions that refuse to die, gifts that demand a terrible price, winter spirits hungry for warmth, and wishes that should never have been whispered at all.” The Dark Crooked One is much more of a full-throttle horror tale, featuring a seasonal bogeyman – and indeed, Stephen King’s 1973 short story The Bogeyman gets namechecked in it – so it’s attributed to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I use for my scary fiction.
Though most of the horror in The Dark Crooked One is supernatural in character, there’s a little real-life horror present too. This is the stress and pain that comes when family-members, who don’t necessarily get along very well, are cooped up together in a couple of rooms during December 25th, one of the shortest and wintriest days of the year, and are forced to eat too much and drink too much whilst making it look like they’re enjoying themselves. And have to listen to the King’s Speech (or the Queen’s Speech, as it was at the time the story is set).
Black Hare Press have done an excellent job in packaging Eerie Christmas 4. Not only have they been thorough in editing and proofing the text, but they’ve added decorative embellishments to its pages – marginalia, chapter ornamentations and dinkuses – which are both festive and spooky. This anthology is strongly recommended.
Containing 40 tales of Yuletide terror, Eerie Christmas 4 can be ordered in different formats from different vendors via this webpage here.
Just read your story in my copy. Wonderful pacing, sublimely subtle tension, deliciously ambiguous ending.
Hello and thank you for your kind words, Dawn. I also enjoyed your contribution to ‘Eerie Christmas 4’ — it certainly snaked into my imagination and held me in its coils!